The workings of collaborative governance: Evaluating collaborative community-building initiatives in Korea

Abstract

The topic of local and community governance has garnered increasing attention from researchers in recent years, with the resulting assessments generally identifying both the advantages and obstacles. On the positive side, collaborative community governance is often viewed as a new participatory space facilitating democratic practices with favourable social and relational outcomes. Conversely, the issues of power imbalances and the continued hierarchical influence of the central government are often cited as obstacles to genuine public engagement and horizontal collaboration among diverse actors. In particular, numerous studies argue that the governance structure and initial motivation exert significant influence over the governance processes and outcomes due to the different prioritisation of goals and strategies. Such considerations demonstrate the need for additional comparative studies in diverse contexts. In addition to addressing the limitation of the existing process-focused evaluations, this study proposes an analytic framework of collaborative community governance that identifies the multiple relationships between institutional setting, governance process and outcomes, and examines two community-building initiatives in Korea. The findings demonstrate that collaborative community governance worked as an experiential incubator for individual transformation, social and relational resource building and political empowerment. The comparative analysis of two different collaborative forms reveals that differences in structure and the mode of communication resulted in building different types of relational capital (bonding vs bridging). The lack of preliminary discussions and arrangement for institutional design is highlighted as a source of problems such as excessive dependency on particular communication modes, opaque system of representation and asymmetrical development of relational resources.